Cool - phisics in procedural planet? Great. Every day a good surprise. yahoo

I think you might be making the same mistake I did, Space Engineer said that he was just testing out stuff with models with multiple textures and he just happened to use a car, there is no new physics or anything. (although the current physics in game mode might still allow you to kind of drive).

Importing ships models in the OBJ fromat with material and multiple textures

Cache for textures and models

So I finished the cache for (ships) textures and models. Now it is possible to use models that share the same textures, and each unique texture will be stored in the video memory only once. And unlike SE 0.96, now it is possible to use many copies of a single ship (i.e. making a fleet of shuttles or starships etc), and its model get stored in video memory only once too - each copy of the ship will use the same model. Ships textures and models cache are now included into SE memory manager, so SE now automatically unloads unused models and textures when video memory is free and needed for loading new stuff (planetary textures, galaxies, new ships, etc).

These screenshots show a fleet of all models I use now with 4 copies of one very huge ship. Its model has almost 1 million triangles and uses 104 Mb of VRAM, however it is stored only once, so these 4 ships use only 104 Mb. All these ships uses 258 Mb for models and 152 Mb for textures - now we see how important it is to avoid multiple copies of textures in memory.

The size of models will be significantly reduced when I implement the ship constructor. Now every fuel tank, every engine nozzle, every support beam is made of its own polygons. But in the constructor ships will be made by a few dozen main parts, and each part will have its own model, stored in the memory only once.

The next step is making a possibility of dynamically adding and removing space ships. I'll make a simple interface with the buttons "create ship here" and "destroy ship".

Good news for modders - now SE supports importing models from the OBJ format with the material library (MTL), So SE now supports multiple textures per model, and you don't need to make a single texture atlas. It is possible to even have no textures in some parts of the model, just the color materials, and still have a good looking model (one car in the screenshot uses no textures).

Huge ships:

Small ships. Cars are just a test for importing new code. That weird stuff with two spheres and boxes is a (single) test model too - it shows that smoothing of normals are working right (one sphere is smooth, while the second shows flat triangles).

Good news for modders - now SE supports importing models from the OBJ format with the material library (MTL), So SE now supports multiple textures per model, and you don't need to make a single texture atlas. It is possible to even have no textures in some parts of the model, just the color materials, and still have a good looking model (one car in the screenshot uses no textures).

I don't know if you actually did say this, but will we be able to import custon shapes to use in the ship constructor and perhaps save shapes that you often use? The future ship constructor sounds pretty cool.

I do have another question. For the Wiki system will we be able to have the option to see the chemical composition of the atmosphere? For instance we could have percentages of all the different gases put in some kind of list or table which can be opened under the Atmospheric section. (I'll use earth as an example below). I understand their may not be room to just throw it in there so I was thinking of having different pages or tabs of some kind for all the basic information on that planets atmosphere. Just some ideas I thought of but wasn't sure if it was already being implemented into SE.